Blockchain for Brexit: a wonderfully terrible idea

We've been here before. Blockchain, the antidote to all the world's greatest ills, is once again being trotted out as a solution to Brexit.

The last time, you might remember, it was our dear Chancellor of the Exchequer, Spreadsheet Phil himself, who decided that the distributed and supposedly immutable version of the humble spreadsheet was “the most obvious technology” to tackle... oh just the incredibly complex and sensitive Irish border question.

And amazingly (although also somewhat predictably), our Phil wasn't the first to suggest such a thing. There have been whole papers written about a blockchain for Brexit; countless column inches dedicated to the fanciful idea.

This time, it's the turn of an “internet pioneer” and CoinDesk advisory board member Pindar Wong, who penned an op-ed entitled “Is it time for a blockchain Brexit?” (cc Betteridge, Ian) that was published on CoinDesk, a crypto news site, on Monday.

But where our Phil lacked detail (admitting that he was no “expert” on the matter), Wong has us covered.

He starts powerfully; passionately; provocatively:

There is a crisis in governance. I’m not talking about bitcoin, but Brexit.
Wow, yeah. He totally caught us out there. Clever.

He carries on:

Where blockchain can help is that its ‘cryptographic certainty’ avoids the need for bordered thinking in the borderless world created by the internet, a world where laws are difficult to enforce and collaboration difficult to incentivise. Could thinking harder about what we mean by a ‘border’ be the key to unlocking the current political deadlock?

Read Full Article: Click me